whence personal responsibility?

[cellio]

A story in today's paper reported that in Richmond VA, in a city park with fenced areas for animals, the park-keepers killed two black bears because one of them bit a child and they had to find out if there was a threat of rabies. (The only test for rabies in an animal kills the animal.) These bears have been in that park for years, and when the news broke (days after the deed was done), people in the community were outraged.

The child, four years old and accompanied by his mother, bypassed one four-foot-high barrier and then put his hand through a larger chain-link fence. The article didn't say, but I assume there were plenty of "keep away from the bears" signs too, in case two fences didn't make that point. The child got bitten (not badly enough to require stitches). Mom couldn't identify the biting bear, so both of the bears in that pen were killed.

Rabies is an unpleasant disease, but it is treatable. The treatment is painful, but many people have to undergo it because they have no choice. Sometimes you do something stupid and have to suffer the consequences; sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time and, yet, you still have to suffer the consequences. Life isn't fair, and sometimes no one is at fault.

Accidents happen, and the kid here is not to blame. For all we know, neither is the mother -- there are conflicting reports about whether she helped him climb the first barrier or looked away for a moment and he did it on his own. But that doesn't matter (except for settling the tort); even if this was completely an accident, a fluke, people have to accept some personal responsibility. It appears that someone made a decision to test the bears instead of treating the kid just in case; I think that decision was wrong.

There was clearly no fault on the part of the park or the bears themselves, so the child's discomfort is not adequate reason for killing the bears. The child, and the mother, could have gotten a valuable lesson about personal responsibility here, but they didn't. It probably didn't even occur to the parents, because we increasingly live in a world where the meme is "protection over everything, and when that doesn't work find someone to take it out on". But that doesn't help kids grow up into responsible adults, and you can't child-proof (and idiot-proof) the world anyway.

We are becoming, and raising, a nation of spoiled brats, who think that if they're unhappy, there must be someone to punish -- as if that makes anything any better. Punishment should be reserved for willful acts (including negligence). When there is clearly no fault, we need to minimize the overall damage, not our personal damage.

By the way, the bears tested negative.

Comments

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I could rant on this subject at some length, but I'll just say: Seconded.

[siderea]

Uh, were you not reading my journal about my rabies scare?

Rabies treatment is not merely painful -- it's has a non-zero chance of being fatal. It's a live virus vacine. Sometimes the treatment kills the patient.

And that's why they don't simply give it to anyone, least of all children.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

So your interpretation is that killing the bears (in order to test them) was punishing them for biting someone?

[spiritdancer]

Rabies is an unpleasant disease, but it is treatable. The treatment is painful, but many people have to undergo it because they have no choice. Sometimes you do something stupid and have to suffer the consequences; sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time and, yet, you still have to suffer the consequences. Life isn't fair, and sometimes no one is at fault.

OK, this should be clarified a bit.

If you are known to be exposed to rabies (ie, the animal that does the biting is identified and tests positive), there is a preventative treatment involving vaccines to try to prevent the virus getting to the brain.

If you develop clinical rabies (ie, the virus has gotten to the nervous system), the current state of things is that you are going to die. There is a single case of a human surviving in the last few years - IIRC, a child of about 12 years who was maintained in a medically induced coma until the virus ran its course. I haven't seen anything about followup on that case, other than the child survived (no word of long-term outcome). The US averages 2 to 3 deaths from rabies each year, and I understand it's a particularly nasty way to die.

What happened in the case of the bears (leaving aside the idiocy of the child and parent), is a matter of public health laws. In WV, the letter of the law requires any unvaccinated animal (not given the rabies vaccine by a veterinarian) that bites a person be tested for rabies. The doctor treating the person is required to report animal bites to the local health department, which handles tracking down and testing the animal. For a vaccinated animal, there is a provision for a quarantine period (usually 10 to 14 days, and varies by state). If the animal dies in the quarantine period, it is tested. If it survives, all is OK (an animal is only able to transmit the virus for a short period after the virus gets to the brain, before it dies).

There are no provisions (at least in WV) for vaccination and/or quarantine of animals for which the rabies vaccine has not been studied and approved - most domestic animals are covered; wildlife isn't. Interestingly, wolf-hybrid dogs aren't allowed a quarantine here, as they are not specifically covered on the vaccine label, and there is a documented case of a wolf-hybrid vaccinate contracting clinical rabies.

There could definitely have been an argument made for quarantine of these bears, as they were confined and could be monitored. What likely happened is that someone went for the letter of the law, not the intent (I've had local health department authorities opt to quarantine cats or dogs that have bitten but not been previously vaccinated, but is definitely on a case-by-case basis).

(sorry, this just hit a bit of a sore point)

pet peeve at the zoo

[otterblossom.livejournal.com]

One of the jobs of the attendant in the goat yard at the zoo is to keep an eye out and holler at people to get out of the camel enclosure. There's two fences and signs up that Molly the Camel bites.
We're usually hoarse by the end of the day.
Molly got one boy by the front of the shirt and picked him up. She dropped him when he screeched. I walked over, this is why you don't climb over fences at a zoo.

[(Anonymous)]

So are you done yet? You don't get to spank someone else's kid, even if you really want to.

[mortuus.livejournal.com]

A couple years ago I was in Australia doing the tourist thing, and one day I went to a zoo in Cairns. Immediately I noticed that there were far fewer safety measures than in the U.S. If I'd wanted, I could have easily stuck my fingers in the monkey cage, whereas in the U.S. zoos I'd been to, there was much more distance between the animals and the people watching them. The zoo visitors were invited to just come into the kangaroo enclosure and hang out with the kangaroos. There were no zoo workers there monitoring the roos, just the visitors like me wandering up to the roos and feeding them. For the crocodile enclosures, it would have been so easy to just lean an arm over, no effort really required, and have it bitten off. For a couple seconds I thought, "This places is a lawsuit or two waiting to happen," but then I thought that maybe there was actually personal responsibility taught to kids here, so people DIDN'T lean their arms over into the crocodile pen. I tried to some people watching to see if people (including kids) did dumb things, but didn't see anything stupid, which I usually see in American zoos. I'm still pondering what it all means.

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

The kid, with all of the faculties of a four-year-old, has been attacked and injured by a creature that ranks right up there with "Lion" in our culture for archetypal powerful wilderness beast that kills people single-handed. We have the capacity to know just how easily this turned out, but I'm fairly confident the kid got the point well enough that there may be therapy bills down the road, and the marginal instructive value of painful shots would be pretty minimal.

I'm also inclined to ask considerably less of a kid that age in terms of personal responsibility, simply because they have so few tools to make the right decisions even in perfectly good faith. We're mammals, and that means we start out in a very dependent form that requires the grownups to take the responsibility on our behalf for a while.

Which leads to the real question, which is what sort of personal responsibility does the mom (and the park) bear on behalf of a kid too young to know better. My intuition says that the mother is probably responsible for not running herd on the kid well enough, and (as a result) for the deaths of the two bears as the (tragic but unavoidable, I think, given the points other commenters have made) consequence. Given that newspaper accounts are never good authorities for the details, I can't rule out the possibility that the park has some responsibility.

I also give the mother less of a pass than the kid, but I'm still not entirely sure what she's going through when everything's totaled up comes out as "coddling". A more interesting, more useful, and (pretty much as a consequence) much more complex question than "how should we have dealt with this after?" is "why do so many people who haven't (yet) nearly lost their kid to a bear think defeating evident security measures around wild animals can possible be an OK thing?"